Of the Kubrick films I've seen (Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut) only Eyes Wide Shut didn't immediately make it to my mental list of all-time favourites. And I enjoyed Eyes Wide Shut.
2001: A Space Odyssey sits somewhere between the pack of all-time favourites and Eyes Wide Shut. From the moment HAL severs Frank Poole's oxygen supply and we see him hurtle through space, I felt an incredible unease which just grew in intensity as the end of the film came closer, and I fucking loved it. The Dawn of Man sequence was pretty amazing too, with a similar "OH SHIT" feeling as when I found out that real apes have been using tools in Africa.
But the trip to the moon was boring as bat shit. I understand that at the time it would have been amazing to see things like a videophone and space travel in a 1968 cinema, and I understand that the sheer banality of the sequence was to demonstrate that this kind of thing was normal in the year 2001, but I was close to gouging my eyes out when, finally, Dr. Floyd got to the moon and freaked me the fuck out again by finding the monolith.
Visually the whole thing was just mind-blowing and the famous score was indeed epic, so all-in-all I enjoyed it quite a bit.
